'Cole opened his present. He found a nightmare.'

Hi there, my fellow readers. Welcome to my next project, known on YouTube as Creepy Pastas. I've combined this audio story with a musical background for a truly  unnerving experience.

Click on the picture above to follow the link to YouTube and try out the story for yourself. Have a wonderful weekend and I will be back with another Creepy Pasta next Friday. See you soon, everyone!

The 'First Years of Fear' short story collection is coming soon to electronic and paperback bookshelves in June 2016.

Are you a writer? Do you feel like you never have time to actually write?

Sometimes, with our busy schedules and hectic family lives, our best bet for achieving our dreams is getting up an hour earlier. It doesn't sound like much, but a single hour each day, times six days a week, can create some powerful personal progress as the years roll by. My girlfriend and I just agreed to get up at 6 am each morning to write, before our busy schedules can interfere. My day feels infinitely better when I've already got eight pages written and done by 9 am, rather than scrambling throughout the rest of my day trying to fit in time to write. Of course, everyone's situation is a little different, but if you're a writer struggling to find time to do your thing, perhaps getting up a little earlier is the answer. Personally, I recommend finding a writer friend on a similar schedule. It makes a big difference in the long haul, to have someone figuratively at your side, helping you to stay focused and keep sacrificing for your larger goals.  

This entry is an example of some of the work I've posted on SixWordMemoirs.com.  For any writers out there who feel like they have no time to polish their craft, this format  is a useful option. This is even smaller than twitter's nano-fiction options (limited to 140 characters). Personally, when I'm neck deep in a novel, taking a step back to work on something as small as a six-word memoir or a flash fiction piece (under 1,000 words), is a pleasant change of pace. 

​Every once in a while, I write a chapter which easily flows from one idea to the next. I love those scenes where the characters are organically interacting, bringing up conflicts and allegations I didn't even think of beforehand, and making the story so much better in the process. Fiction writing feels like an amazing job, when the characters in your head are doing all the work. The trick is getting that mindset to last beyond one chapter. Writer's block is part of the process and happens to the best of us, but secretly, one day I hope to write a novel straight through, without interruption, on the proverbial wings of my hard-working characters. One day!